As a phenomenon, climate change is hard to capture. While its science is mostly uncontested, its politics is not. What we do know is that climate change is warming the atmosphere, with direct and indirect impacts on people, societies, and the natural environment. Like humans, flora and fauna physically suffer from rising temperatures, which also dry out soils and increase the risk of forest and bush fires. Meanwhile, warmer air absorbs more water vapour, leading to extreme weather events with heavy rainfall. Droughts and heavy rains both contribute to human suffering by negatively affecting agriculture (and thus food security) or by challenging and destroying existing infrastructure. The negative impacts of climate change are thus many and varied.
The main cause of global warming is the massive burning of fossil energy sources such as coal, oil, and gas since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1750s. Such burning produces gases (mainly CO2) that accumulate in the atmosphere (and also in the oceans). There, they create the same effect as in a greenhouse: short-wave solar radiation can pass through these gases and reach the Earth’s surface, where it is converted into long-wave thermal radiation. These longer waves, however, cannot radiate through greenhouse gases back out to space and so remain in the atmosphere as heat. In addition to burning fossil fuels, also other activities cause greenhouse gases (GHGs), for instance, ploughing up green land, which releases soil-bound GHGs, such as CO2 or nitrous oxide (N2O), or animal husbandry as cattle emit methane (CH4).
The planetary boundaries framework has two control variables related to climate change. The first is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million (ppm). With the 2015 update of the planetary boundaries concept, the second is the amount of energy remaining in the Earth’s greenhouse (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Richardson and Rockström2015). This effect is called radiative forcing and is measured in watt per square metre (W/m2). Until the industrial revolution, the thermal balance between the energy received from the sun and the energy radiated by the earth was roughly equal. The greenhouse effect means that much more energy is being retained in the atmosphere. The values of the two control variables are well above their pre-industrial reference values. The boundary value for the CO2 concentration is 350 ppm, while the latest update of the concept puts the current value at 417 ppm. The radiative forcing boundary value is 1 W/m2, with an actual value of 2.91 (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Steffen and Lucht2023).
It is clear from what has been said that climate change is a moral wrong, the causes of which must be mitigated and to which both individuals and societies must adapt to avoid unacceptable harms. Now, GHG emissions are largely the result of the ways humans produce and use energy and food, and as such are deeply embedded in the daily lives of all people. What is needed are ‘forms of life’ (Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi2018) that emit as little GHGs as possible. This is already a huge ethical challenge, as it involves intense and controversial social deliberations about what constitutes a good human life in such radically different circumstances. Then there are the costs and burdens of climate change, a challenge exacerbated by the fact those causing climate change and those most severely affected often belong to different groups. This leads to debates about restorative and distributive justice (Kalfagianni & Meisch Reference Kalfagianni and Meisch2020). Current climate change is caused by GHGs emitted in previous decades by people in the Global North and now harming people, often the most vulnerable social groups, in the Global South. So, people today need to correct past social choices while ensuring that future people can live good lives. Moreover, climate change interacts with most of the other challenges addressed in the planetary boundaries framework (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Steffen and Lucht2023). For this reason, the philosopher Stephen Gardiner (Reference Gardiner2011) calls it the ‘perfect moral storm’. The STS scholar Reiner Grundmann (Reference Grundmann2016: 562) describes climate change as a ‘wicked social problem’, that is, ‘one that cannot be solved, but must instead be re-solved and renegotiated, over and over again’.
Both chapters on climate change in this volume address the ethical challenge of such a constant renegotiation of climate change, and more specifically, how we know about climate change and whose knowledge contributions count in policy responses to (the causes as well as the effects of) climate change. Both raise ethical questions of epistemic justice, that is, dealing with the unjust aspects of knowledge production processes (Kidd et al. Reference Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017). Gay-Antaki’s and Sandré and Gheradi’s texts challenge the specific understanding of Western science as objective and universal, when, in fact, it is culturally embedded and as such carries specific value judgements, for example, about the social role of science, forms of acceptable harm, or human–nature relations. While cultural embeddedness is not in itself a problem, it can become one if the underlying normativity remains unquestioned. Such a problem is the question of which knowledge contributions are considered relevant for describing the challenges of climate change or how to respond to them. As both chapters argue, Western climate science unduly values some forms of knowledge over others, thereby silencing relevant knowledge holders and producing morally problematic knowledge for action.
Consequently, in their own ways, both chapters address the role of scholars as co-producers of knowledge. In her conceptual chapter, Gay-Antaki argues from a feminist decolonial perspective for ‘world travelling’ as a different mode of knowledge production that engages deeply with other ways of knowing about the world. For their part, Sandré and Gheradi draw on their experience of working on a project in the Arctic and ask how, as researchers, they have developed an epistemic virtuousness that allows them to amplify plural voices within science.
6.1 Introduction: Against the Age of ‘Man’
Planetary boundaries were devised to call into action concerted global efforts to preserve ‘Earth system stability for the survival of humanity’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Steffen and Noone2009). As discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume, planetary boundaries required identifying and quantifying biophysical targets that should not be surpassed to maintain the Holocene state, a time where ‘environmental change occurred naturally, and Earth’s regulatory capacity maintained the conditions that enabled human development’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Steffen and Noone2009: 472). The Anthropocene, or ‘the age of man’, has been described as the most current epoch where man’s activities have unsettled the balance of the Holocene and is traced to the beginning of the industrial revolution. Given this clear marker of the Anthropocene that can be traced to a specific space and time, that was inclusive of specific exploitative activities of both humans and the environment (the industrial revolution and consequent global capitalism occurred in tandem with and necessitated colonization and slavery), the question of ‘who is the human in the Anthropocene’ (Collard & Dempsey Reference Collard and Dempsey2018) should be central to this formulation, even more so as we seek to move away from global environmental harm. Yet, the most popular solutions to this problem are devised under the same operating frameworks causing the Anthropocene. The threat of looming thresholds shifts important conversations away from ideology and values toward quick technoscientific fixes that fail to question whether these might be the best, most encompassing long-term approaches to resolve global environmental change.
Specifically, in this short chapter, I consider the social, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of ‘climate change’, one of the nine planetary boundaries, and the challenges and opportunities that the framing of planetary boundary represents. The objective of creating these boundaries was that we do not surpass them and do all we can to help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change. Climate change was one of three boundaries portrayed as already transgressing the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ when the concept of planetary boundaries was operationalized (the other two transgressors were rate of biodiversity loss, and human interference with the nitrogen cycle). While three was the ‘baseline’ planetary boundary assessment, others are frequently being reported as crossed (Persson et al. Reference Persson, Carney Almroth and Collins2022). Given that such clear-cut boundaries and specific thresholds were identified and quantified, my feminist decolonial training interrogates how vague terms such as ‘human activities’ or ‘unacceptable’ could be used to advance this concept. Surely, not all ‘human activities’ are responsible for climate change, and many would disagree what changes may count as acceptable or unacceptable. Yet the conversation of respecting boundaries, even though centred on measurable and quantifiable markers, inevitably brings up moral and ethical questions regarding what constitutes appropriate or desirable human behaviour on this Earth (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2022: 1088).
Mary O’Brien, a feminist biologist, stresses the importance of feminist perspectives around issues that concern humanity. For instance, mainstream attempts to address climate change employ a seemingly objective scientific method to figure out how much more we can contaminate, exterminate, abuse, or warm up, to remain on Earth (O’Brien Reference O’Brien1993). The way that climate change has been addressed, mostly by scientists from the Global North, has failed to reduce global warming or differential impacts. Often proposed mechanisms to address the crisis, such as carbon markets, only exacerbate social and environmental inequalities and fail to halt the use of fossil fuels (Westholm & Arora-Jonsson Reference Westholm and Arora-Jonsson2018). For these reasons, the need to develop and integrate approaches that challenge the structures and mechanisms that created the crisis in the first place is becoming increasingly apparent. Incorporating different visions to combat problems as complex as climate change may seem insurmountable to those who live comfortably in the normative strata of society and who believe in the universal quality of their knowledge. But for many others, knowing and navigating different worlds and ways of knowing has always been a matter of survival. Many lessons can be learned from those who ‘cross borders’ (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa and McCann2003), and who are hybrid and bilingual (Cusicanqui Reference Cusicanqui2012). As Collins (Reference Collins1986) explains, marginalized groups have had to learn to navigate a world full of oppressive systems (patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism) as a way of survival by creating a vision that allows them to see the world more clearly, enabling them to navigate it safely.
In this chapter I offer border crossing as an approach to challenge power relations that produce and legitimize western scientific knowledge and, along with its distribution, the way in which it systematically disadvantages people because of their gender, geography, race, religion, nationality, sexuality, colonial status, and so on. By delineating power relations that transform people into hierarchical categories, we can begin to challenge socio-environmental relations that contribute to the climate crisis to cultivate more just and resilient pathways.
6.2 Western (Climate) Science as Objective and Universalizing
While the historical dichotomy of science being objective, impersonal, and masculine, and ‘feminine’ being all the opposite seems outdated, the majority of women and men still believe that men are better suited for science (Shen Reference Shen2013). This construction of science naturalizes gender and gender differences within the sciences and explains that many women simply decide to not pursue science. This formulation hides the historical exclusionary practices of science and elucidates that there are power relations within science where gender relations have been central in defining the normative knowledge producer as male, white, and western (Harding Reference Harding1986; Maynard Reference Maynard1997; Merchant Reference Merchant1990). The ahistorical and apolitical understanding of western science is one of the main mechanisms that allow this way of thinking not only to dominate how we understand the world, but not to question why western scientific practice is still so exclusionary of women and people of colour. To borrow from Grosfoguel (Reference Grosfoguel2007), the domination of western science as the only legitimate way to know things means that even if we do see an increase of different faces participating in science, it does not mean that these scientists will automatically challenge oppressive western scientific structures (Gay-Antaki, Reference Gay-Antaki2022). On the contrary, members that are welcome in western scientific spaces, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or policy spaces such as the Conference of the Parties (COP), will most likely be trained in and promote western epistemology and worldviews even if they inhabit non-western spaces. This is precisely one of the biggest victories of western epistemology, by removing its locus of enunciation – it’s western roots – by equating western, masculine, and white to neutral and universal, by claiming objectivity, western science has placed itself as the only legitimate way to know the world (Mignolo Reference Mignolo1999).
As western science has claimed to be the universal way to know things, so has western climate change science become the universal way to understand and address global environmental change. Even though a very small stratum of society has the privilege of ahistorical and apolitical understandings of global climate change, this stratum has the most power and voice guiding global efforts to adapt and mitigate climate change. For instance, at the beginning of the global climate talks, during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COPs, after the Rio Summit in 1992, industrialized nations clearly recognized their role in producing most of the historical global emissions leading to global warming. Actions forward were to represent this differential responsibility where Annex 1 countries (industrialized countries in UN language) would lead the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions followed later by non-Annex countries (or Global South countries) (Vanhala & Hestbaek Reference Vanhala and Hestbaek2016). However, this acknowledgement of common but differentiated responsibility around climate change became very contentious and was quickly stifled, even though it remains a central issue at every COP meeting. Instead, mechanisms such as the Talanoa Dialogue, which seek to escape conflict by avoiding holding certain parties accountable, are fostered during the climate talks so that certain parties can be protected from being singled out during the negotiations (Lesniewska & Siegele Reference Lesniewska and Siegele2018).
Under an Anthropocene frame, moral and ethical accountability, and thus actions to cut emissions, remain a distant goal as responsibility for emissions becomes blurred and narratives of a sinking ship (meaning we are all in this together) take precedence. Few would argue against urgent global action to address climate change threats; equally important is the everyday reality of the disproportionate impact that certain geographies and populations are already experiencing due to global warming. Yet, global calls to action usually fail to address climate change threats against the most vulnerable and at risk. The prevalent concept of planetary boundaries by Rockström et al. (Reference Rockström, Steffen and Noone2009) is a case in point; global environmental problems are described in measurable terms that set thresholds and boundaries trying to delimit how much more we can contaminate, or warm up, and still remain in an inhabitable Earth. The global and urgent framing allows apolitical and ahistorical understandings of the problem and thus solutions that fail to challenge epistemic and power hierarchies that are responsible for ongoing environmental change. For instance, as argued in Gay-Antaki (Reference Gay-Antaki2022), the agreement to limit global warming by the end of the century to 2° Celsius, one of the most successful treaties to come out of the COP negotiations during Paris in 2015, was proposed by powerful countries consisting of the G8 (the USA, the UK, Germany, etc.) who believed this was a good threshold. Island Nation States have had to fight to make their voices heard since while a 2° Celsius threshold might seem reasonable to the G8, this threshold would put many Island States under the rising sea. As a matter of survival, most actions to adapt and mitigate climate change are already occurring and must take on a very localized response, which most global initiatives fail to do so.
6.3 Western (Climate) Science as Socially and Culturally Embedded
Even though climate change science carries hegemonic power, it is also highly contested as it is a science highly driven by national and international politics of climate change (Demeritt Reference Demeritt2001). This positioning of climate science stands in sharp contrast with the idea of science as neutral, objective, and universal. This public understanding of science gives way for discrediting both knowledge claims and public policy decisions based upon these claims when the social relations through which climate science is constructed are disclosed (Grasswick Reference Grasswick2014). Climate sceptics use the narrative of western hegemonic science to discount the science of climate change; as it is politicized such that science is seen as no longer objective and thus no different from folk, or traditional knowledge. This idealized understanding of science also impedes the practice of science becoming more democratic, gatekeeping what science looks like and who can practice it.
Climate change poses a seemingly insurmountable conundrum, while it will require a concerted global response, its impacts are grounded and embodied; actions are necessarily local, but policies and big technologies are devised and formulated far away from where they are intended to be implemented. Concerted, gradual, global action is necessary, but so is immediate, grounded action. While these debates lead many climate scientists to attempt to convince climate sceptics by throwing more science at them (that will still be embedded in social relations), we would be better off by trying to change public understandings of science and scientific practice. As ‘[s]cience on its own offers no moral vision, no ethical stance, and no political architecture for delivering the sort of world people desire’ (Hulme Reference Hulme2020: 310), it seems key to participate with critical perspectives and historical understandings of the power that science wields in our society. As Hillary Rose, a feminist sociologist, has long argued, to exclude ourselves from spaces where such power is yielded allows the status quo to continue without any criticism or effort to incorporate equity and justice dimensions (Rose Reference Rose2007 [1994]). Tuana underscores that ‘the point, then, is not to eliminate politics or interests from science, but to understand which interests advance knowledge and for whom, and which obstruct knowledge, again for whom’ (Reference Tuana, Alston and Whittenbury2013: 18).
An example of social scientists engaging with planetary boundaries is offered by Gupta et al. (Reference Gupta, Liverman and Bai2021), who ask that social scientists engage with planetary boundaries to ‘ensure transformative, planetary justice’ (Reference Gupta, Liverman and Bai2021: 3). They propose that adding justice targets to each biophysical target might ‘avoid significant (irreversible and existential) harm to humans’ (Gupta et al. Reference Gupta, Liverman and Bai2021: 3). Gupta et al. explain that ‘[e]arth system stability for the survival or even wellbeing of humanity is not necessarily just for all humans and that safe targets may even make things worse for some’ (Reference Gupta, Liverman and Bai2021: 3). They explain that some of the ‘safe’ targets may be at odds with social environmental justice and may disproportionately impact the most vulnerable. For instance, ‘setting aside large areas … from human use for biodiversity protection, without addressing systemic issues, such as inequality in land tenure and the food consumption habits of the rich, could have potentially devastating impacts on the world’s poor and food security’ (Reference Gupta, Liverman and Bai2021: 3). Gupta et al. propose to add a justice perspective within the planetary boundary perspective. While this might speak to those in power, the addition of justice in such a narrow framework limits the work and impact that social scientists might have if they were to truly push the boundaries of the planetary boundary perspective.
6.4 Border Crossing: Feminist Decolonial Approaches and Climate Change
Climate change presents an opportunity for border crossing like no other problem: as a localized and embedded problem, it underscores the embodiment of climate change knowledge and fights against the idea of universal knowledge – a view from nowhere – as it enunciates the location of the knower. This localization stresses the social practice of science and its inseparability from sociopolitical positionings encouraging questioning preconceptions about expertise, legitimacy, and knowledge.
Insights from feminist, queer, Black, and decolonial scholars elucidate the relationship between the domination of nature, women, and people of colour. The bifurcation of nature from culture and the consequent association of white, masculine, and western to culture, and Brown, feminine, and non-western to nature, have sanctioned an ongoing domination of western epistemological practices over all others, claiming to be universal. In other words, western scientific thought pretends to be the only legitimate way to know things about this world. It might be more fruitful to disrupt, challenge, and underscore the narrow operating framework of this vision and the epistemic violence against other ways of knowing. Border crossing as a feminist geographical decolonial approach can offer alternatives to build a truly inclusive and transformative climate change science.
Feminism is a useful approach to diversify our knowledge base as it has long challenged the logic and rational procedures that seek objectivity. Feminists have long worked to highlight gendered power dynamics that have often been invisible in our society. Rather than believing we can be ‘objective observers’ or as Donna Haraway expressed having ‘an all-seeing eye’, the introspective approach offered by feminism doubts that there is an external reality that represents the truth waiting to be discovered. Feminism stresses that our sociopolitical position determines what we know and are capable of understanding (Harding Reference Harding1986). ‘Border crossing develops a view from somewhere, that requires constant dialogue to work through tensions, difference, and contradictions to get closer to understanding climate change’ (Gay-Antaki Reference Gay-Antaki2022: 118). Importantly, underscoring the location of the knower has the potential to flatten knowledge hierarchies and operationalize the knowledge that is needed for the specific problem to be addressed.
In a recent article, I stress the importance of centring feminist analyses at the intersection of race and location to find sustainable pathways to climate change. Centring race and location when attempting to better understand and address climate change asks that the solutions we propose do not perpetuate structures that continue to disadvantage and marginalize those who have long been silenced by western science and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Alongside women of colour and Global South feminists I underscore that one of the most powerful ways to challenge oppressive climate structures is to transform who participates in the climate debate. To centre women of colour and Global South voices as agents of change in the climate debate will demand a complete restructuring of how we prioritize climate knowledge and action. This centring would elucidate just how similar or different well-meaning mainstream concepts aimed to mitigate and adapt to climate change are from those that perpetuate epistemic hierarchies, paternalistic approaches, modernization, and marketization ideologies that continue to exploit those from the periphery even in the struggle to address climate change. Concepts such as planetary boundaries and the Anthropocene would take on different meanings and understandings that would be relatable for most of the world’s population. Shouldn’t this be one of the driving forces of a universal approach to addressing one of the world’s most pressing concerns?
Border crossing will not automatically discard useful knowledge just because of a label. On the contrary, border crossing as a method can expand our epistemological canon; contrary to western science’s requirement of an objective observer, border crossing values knowledge that is produced by people who are situated and informed by their sociopolitical position while challenging colonial categories (all people are situated; thus, all knowledge is situated). For many who navigate comfortably in the normative strata of society, shifting the centre might seem like an impossible challenge, or might even perceive such a shift as a threat. For many others, who experience the normative strata as ‘minorities’ or ‘outsiders’, knowing and navigating the normative space has been a matter of survival. In the words of Maria Lugones, a feminist decolonial scholar, most of us ‘who are outside the mainstream of, for example, the U.S. dominant construction or organization of life are “world travelers” as a matter of necessity and of survival … inhabiting more than one “world” at the same time and “traveling” between “worlds” is part and parcel of our experience and our situation’ (Lugones Reference Lugones1987). For this reason, ‘I believe that there is much to gain from learning from those who are “world travelers” (Lugones Reference Lugones1987) “border crossers” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa, Anzaldúa and Keating2002), hybrid and bilingual (Cusicanqui Reference Cusicanqui2012) …. This hybridity grants a vantage point that can better understand the world around us’ (Gay-Antaki Reference Gay-Antaki2022). Significantly, it is not that there are knowledges that have been ignored and could simply be added into the mix. As Collins (Reference Collins and Collins1990) underscores, these knowledges are subjugated and violently repressed. This repression is what has given the ‘west’ its power over non-western epistemologies. Importantly, this silencing or indifference toward other knowledges has limited the western perspective. As Hill-Collins explains, ‘it is not that marginalized groups have a privileged perspective, but rather, they have had to learn to navigate many different oppressive systems (here in particular Hill-Collins was referring to black American women) providing a vantage point by which to see the world more clearly and navigate it safely’ (Gay-Antaki Reference Gay-Antaki2022).
The western assumption that we can have an ‘all seeing eye’ limits our ability to resolve global environmental problems such as climate change. The complexity and scale of climate change make it impossible to understand it fully from a single standpoint, and, thus, catch-all solutions proposed from this single standpoint, such as planetary boundaries, will be severely limited. It is becoming increasingly clear that ‘global’ concerted efforts that fail to challenge western epistemological structures are incapable of addressing climate threats against those who are most vulnerable (including more than human species) and might even be making certain populations and geographies more vulnerable. The shift away from addressing ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ at the beginning of the COPs toward ‘loss and damage’ currently underscores a major problem of narratives that claim universal qualities but that clearly represent western and Global North priorities.
Feminist objectivity underscores that the spaces that we inhabit influence what we know and what we can know as subjects of knowledge. Under this framework, no solution can be universal or global. Border crossing can foster a constant dialogue among equal but different subjects of knowledge inspiring us to ask different questions, conduct different research, and build different partnerships, producing more complete knowledge about the world around us that will be better equipped to address both the urgent and long-term impacts of climate change. Border crossing challenges the dominant positivist disciplines in understanding anthropogenic climate change that offer ‘little or no sense of humans as diverse, interpretive creatures who frequently disagree about values, means and ends’ (Castree et al. Reference Castree, Adams and Barry2014: 765). Border crossing underscores how climate change science is socially and culturally embedded resulting in many possible meanings and political trajectories.
By collecting diverse and partial views of global climate change into a collective subject position, border crossing challenges the superior vantage point claimed by western science. By underscoring the situated positions of diverse knowers, border crossing seeks to create a vision from somewhere to better work within the limits and contradictions of climate science to elucidate the complex ways in which gendered and racialized assumptions and power relations that discriminate against women and other marginalized groups are produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged in the IPCC, the climate debate, and science more broadly (Gay-Antaki Reference Gay-Antaki2021). Through border crossing we can better identify and address barriers and opportunities to access and produce quality climate research while fighting against overly narrow conceptions of what is possible and desirable in the fight against climate change.
7.1 Introduction: Converging Gazes
In this chapter, we mobilize our transdisciplinary research within Arctic communities to critique the concept of planetary boundaries (PB) and associated ‘anthropocenic narratives’. We were invited to cross our distinct, but interdisciplinary, gazes to scrutinize the ethical and epistemological tensions that loomed from the encounter of anthropocenic narratives and the ethnographic practices we deploy. As a PhD Research Fellow in social sciences, with a background in climate change adaptation, Tanguy investigated the expression of the plurality of knowledges, experiences, and values within the climate crisis’ narrative, rooting his research in place-based stories. The critical considerations for the science being done and the narrative being supported emerged early and widely in this research pathway. For the second co-author, Jeanne-Marie, it was very little discussed alongside her early training as a geologist, whether it was a blind spot or by virtue of science assumed as unquestionable. For her, it is only recently, in the context of climate emergency and her involvement in interdisciplinary climate research that the question of ethics and justice started being central. Throughout our participation, as project leader and PhD fellow, within the SeMPER-Arctic project (Sense Making, Place attachment and Extended networks as sources of Resilience in the Arctic), we paid attention to place-based stories of changes and upheavals in the Arctic. By transmitting concepts from one discipline to another and bringing in our perspectives, we put ourselves in position to develop a critical, interdisciplinary stance in response to the univocal narrative of the climate crisis which critics argue is often deaf to non-Eurocentric voices. Our exchange is fed by our repetitive fieldwork (seven stays for three to nine weeks between 2021 and 2023) in Ittoqqortoormiit (Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland), where we have identified salient expressions of lived experience with community members.
The reflexive conversation we engage in this chapter aims to highlight power imbalances and the position of researchers in order to discuss the possibilities of an ethic of amplification that addresses equity in the shaping of narratives within the ‘anthropocenic moment’. Our conversation begins with a discussion of the concept of whiteness in the Arctic that we use both as a physical parameter intrinsically linked to Arctic amplification and global climate dynamics for climate scientists and metaphorically as a description of the climate science carried out there amplifying Anthropocene discourse. Then, we suggest that the plurality of voices, perspectives, or concerns needed to address climate change in the Arctic requires not having only the singular story amplified by climate science, that is, the Anthropocene, because that would unethically keep amplifying whiteness at the expense of continued ‘othering’ and disempowering of those in Ittoqqortoormiit and in the rest of the Arctic region. Finally, acknowledging the contestation of ‘anthropocenic narratives’ as expressed among non-Western communities, we consider tensions with the concept of PB, and suggest using it only cautiously, for instance with regard to historical dominations including over other-than-human beings.
7.2 The Whiteness of the Arctic: Amplification and Dampening
Amplification and dampening in the Arctic are fertile and cross-cutting images to frame the conversation. These are both connected to whiteness, whose polysemy is used here either to describe a physical object connected to the larger climate system or to unfold the system that reproduces the dominant way of knowing. Therefore, the polysemic conversation here is guided by climate change–induced shifts in albedo and other positive feedback to ultimately achieve climate coloniality.
7.2.1 Whiteness as a Key Physical Parameter of the Arctic Climate System
The Arctic is often studied by climate scientists for its key role within the larger climate system. This is notably explained by the phenomenon of Polar or Arctic Amplification, by which change in the net radiation balance tends to produce larger changes in temperature in polar regions than, for instance, in mid-latitudes. This process of amplification is observable in the past climate and glacial period, and is expected to become stronger in coming decades (Serreze & Barry Reference Serreze and Barry2011; Previdi et al. Reference Previdi, Smith and Polvani2021). The phenomenon of amplification is strongly associated with positive feedback such as albedo effects, which refer to the fraction of incoming solar energy or light that a surface reflects back to space (Fox-Kemper et al. Reference Fox-Kemper, Hewitt and Xiao2021; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022). This reflected energy is a fundamental component of the earth’s energy balance. The albedo has values between 0 for a black surface that absorbs all energy and reflects none, and 1 for a white surface that behaves like a mirror and reflects all light without absorbing any. The albedo of snow-covered sea ice or of a pristine white is therefore higher than that of the darker open sea. The whiteness of the Arctic, the snow coverage and sea ice extent, plays a major role into the planetary albedo and is therefore of the utmost interest for climate scientists to observe climate change. For instance, the progressive decline of sea ice extent and ice thinning is predicted to reach a seasonal ice-free Arctic Ocean by 2050. The region amplification also produces impacts beyond the Arctic, such as in storm tracks, the jet stream, and planetary waves and their associated energy propagation, as well as accentuated impacts of Pacific variability (Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Screen and Furtado2014; Overland et al. Reference Overland, Francis and Hall2015; Preece et al. Reference Preece, Mote and Cohen2023). It must be noted here that the physical whiteness of the Arctic is itself a narrow representation of the regions which are predominantly and for most of the year uncovered by white surfaces.
7.2.2 Whiteness of the Gaze
Naming whiteness is necessary; it is the ‘invisibility’ of white people, who are presented just as ‘people’, the default norm from which everyone else deviates, that is part of its normative power making. Yet the more you state and claim your ‘whiteness’, without doing any further work to unpack what that means, the more you become fixed to that articulation of self, the more you become wedded to whiteness .… We have to set whiteness up, to name it, to frame it, in order to dissemble it.
Independent of the processes associated with the physical polar whiteness, social notions of whiteness are pervasive in the making of the science itself. Firstly, Arctic climate science remains mostly produced in mid-latitudes, and the field is largely characterized by ‘fly in, fly out’ practices, devoid of any form of local engagement (Skjervedal Reference Skjervedal2021). But it also submerges the framing of the climate change narrative on Arctic regions. Multifaceted changes and upheavals are mainly analysed in a global and science-based approach of climate and environmental sciences that tends to make invisible local contexts and specificities (Bremer et al. Reference Bremer, Wardekker and Dessai2019; Krauß Reference Krauß2020). This is especially significant in the Arctic (Bravo Reference Bravo2009; Holm Reference Holm, Krupnik, Aporta, Gearheard, Laidler and Kielsen Holm2010; Baztan et al. Reference Baztan, Cordier, Huctin, Zhu and Vanderlinden2017; Stephen Reference Stephen2018), where local and Indigenous communities are also often portrayed as passive ‘victim-heroes’ (Roosvall & Tegelberg Reference Roosvall and Tegelberg2013). Even when these approaches acknowledge injustice and recognize agency, they remain views from the outside that preserve a certain kind of narrative. In other words, the conduct of the research itself imposes a restriction on the kind of knowledge involved – for instance, restrained to the realm of the quantifiable (for example, albedo) – in making and sustaining a narrow understanding of the Anthropocene.
With the concept of whiteness at the centre of their analysis, Baldwin and Erickson (Reference Baldwin and Erickson2020) underline the inherent coloniality of the Anthropocene. They argue that the whiteness of the Anthropocene ‘determines not only who can be heard in that space but also the very terms on which the Anthropocene debate unfolds as an object of public concern’ (Baldwin & Erikson Reference Baldwin and Erickson2020: 6). In the Arctic, the regional – but globalizing – science-based narrative tends to annihilate expressions of place-attachment, cultural values, or local knowledge, and hence neglects local agencies through epistemic injustice and violence while strengthening pre-existing power imbalances. By contrast, community responses to a changing climate and environment ‘is deeply implicated in their sense of who they were and are, also in relation to a larger world’ (Hastrup Reference Hastrup2018: 1) and the knowledge they hold (Krupnik & Jolly Reference Krupnik and Jolly2002). For instance, in Ittoqqortoormiit, sea ice changes can only be understood in nonlinear manifestations whose narrations articulate epistemic humility, place-attachment, belonging, and relation with more-than-human beings. Furthermore, the presence or the absence of sea ice shapes seasonality, whose occurrence directly connects with the ability to move and travel, hunting practices and expressions of freedom (Sandré et al. Reference Sandré, Wardekker, Gherardi, Bremer and Wardekker2024).
How do we navigate with this critical view when we apply it to ourselves? We need to acknowledge that we embody the white gaze, which is deployed through whiteness, and that our position is unsatisfactory to address the aforementioned critiques. The SeMPER-Arctic project, for instance, aims at decolonizing concepts such as resilience but was itself developed with limited community engagement. Once the project was funded, we, as critical ethnographers, were committed to ‘explicitly consider how (our) own acts of studying and representing people and situations are acts of domination’ (Noblit et al. Reference Noblit, Flores and Murillo2004: 3). This contradiction pushes us to step back and propose an ethic of amplification, where we aim to decentre our practices and to pluralize the telling of research stories.
7.3 Ethics of Amplification: How to Perform Plural Voices within Science?
We argue that the dominance of white- and science-informed shaping of the climate narrative demands an enhanced practice of softness, care, and listening. While different narratives are at play, with some being historically dominant and hegemonic, we potentially see a space within science to unmute local discourses which so far have systematically been placed at the margins. The uniformity of Anthropocenic narratives, such as the PB framework, intrinsically denies plurality in terms of ways of knowing, living, and responding to change – changes in which climate is not always the dominant framing. The volition to reach objective description and prescription opens an abyss of possibility when it comes to the processes of domination and unfairness to be corrected. Conversely, to the hard ball of natural sciences, following Ingold’s (Reference Ingold, Bergmann and Clingerman2018: 101) metaphor, we propose a softer science, a ‘squishy ball, (that) by contrast, bends and deforms when it encounters other things, taking into itself some of their characteristics while they, in turn, bend to its pressure in accordance with their own inclinations and dispositions’. The metaphor is translated within our practices through an intention to care for place-based communities’ narratives that potentially address processes of empowerment and fairness, while promoting plurality and alterity as crucial ethical lenses for engagement within transdisciplinary environmental research.
7.3.1 Amplifying Voices: Research as a Relation to Support the Expression of Plurality
Science is a powerful tool for good as well as for evil, for emancipation as well as for exploitation. How scientists use their time and talent, their training at public expense, their public research funds, and the public trust are not matters to be brushed aside lightly.
In order to address, but not easily resolve, the criticisms outlined earlier, a new radical way of engaging with research is required, especially when working with groups represented as if on the margins, from yonder, that is, from the non-Western world. We suggest that by employing a critical ethnography framework, we are in a position to endorse ‘an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice’ (Madison Reference Madison2020: 30). This view aims to take care of the sufferings of living beings and commits us to supporting changes towards an improved situation or to minimize sufferings. The critical approach to climate scholarship is all the more relevant as it allows us to emphasize how vulnerability to climate change in the Arctic is constructed through discourses that ignore the effects of colonialism and its ongoing impacts. Its formulation itself extends colonial forms of knowledge and practice (Cameron Reference Cameron2012). For instance, the PB framework relies on measurable and quantitative indicators (e.g., atmospheric CO₂ concentration levels or rates of biodiversity loss) and proxies (e.g., satellite-derived vegetation indices such as NDVI or nitrogen fertilizer application rates). Such global and unanchored metrics are constitutive of a particular, that is, Western, episteme, which, intentionally or not, excludes unquantifiable criteria salient to groups operating within different epistemic frameworks (e.g., spiritual, cultural, or relational values to ecosystems that resist quantification).
The tools used to measure and objectify PB research are abstractions, and these metrics are often very alien to the human population in general (Karlsdóttir et al. Reference Karlsdóttir, Huctin, Gherardi, Vanderlinden and Sandré2023). As critical ethnographers, we subvert concepts such as neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions. This is not a pleasant journey, a fortiori, but not only for researchers like us from the settler’s world, knowing that ‘we have all internalised dominant ideas about what constitutes “good” research and “acceptable” research practice’ (Brown & Strega Reference Brown and Strega2005: 2). A common postulate among research methodologies is that the researcher is an outsider ‘able to observe without being implicated in the scene’ (Smith Reference Smith2021: 157). Neutrality, objectivity, and distance are valued as part of the ‘good science’ framework. Nevertheless, being an outsider experiencing the inside clearly means being part of the landscape, entangled in multiple relationships and taking part in ‘the care enveloping every social interaction’ (field notes, 2021, p. 2). ‘In Indigenous frameworks, relationships matter’ (Smith Reference Smith2021: 137). To deploy an ethical practice oriented towards plurality, it requires us to direct our intention around showing respect to the community we are working with and to walk softly: ‘(Y)ou need to prove that you can actually function as a positive member of that community; there’s no way to do that without becoming a part of that community. That takes time’ (NCAI & MSU 2012: 18).
7.3.2 Ethics towards Plurality: Why Does It Matter?
What makes plurality an ethically important consideration? We distance our views from those that support a plurality of views (on climate change, for example) only when they seem appropriate for dominant policy decisions but still fail to recognize local contexts. Our aims are not an instrumental plurality directed towards mastering, but to address a process of fairness. Within environmental justice and transdisciplinary research, narrative-centred approaches have shown their value to support the capacity of marginalized communities and groups to speak for themselves (Ottinger Reference Ottinger2017) and to make sense of changes in the light of their own knowledge, beliefs, and experiences (Vanderlinden et al. Reference Vanderlinden, Baztan and Chouinard2020). Sultana (Reference Sultana2022) argues for the crucial place of lived experiences to counterbalance hegemonic framings and structural forces that perform climate coloniality. A narrative-centred methodology allows for reframing categories and for recognizing that the science-based or policy-oriented way of categorizing the world is not necessarily salient and often insufficient, especially but not only in postcolonial contexts. In that way, narratives elicit the plurality of worlds and alternative worldviews existing outside and alongside the Western world. As Jonsson (Reference Jonsson2016: 1) argues, ‘It is only when the Indigenous attains the place of the subject telling the story that we can seriously claim to have a postcolonial narrative of the Arctic.’ In Ittoqqortoormiit, alongside more formal interviews, the gesture of decentring our gaze, adopting a relational approach, pushed us to consider stories that were not initially in the scope of our research. While investigating the impacts of climate change through narratives of lived experience, we opened up space for other salient stories to emerge. One of those was associated with the central importance of mattak (narwhal skin) and threats to the future of narwhals hunting. That led us to the co-production of a short film in the native language and with community members. With this short film, we also tried to correct the inherent lack of engagement in the design and conduct of our research project. Feedback and evaluations by community members following the screening and the diffusion within the community – for example, repeated comments such as ‘we’ve been telling that for many years’ and ‘you/we need to spread it out to the world’ – suggest that an important step towards inclusive and fair research practices has been reached (Karlsdóttir et al. Reference Karlsdóttir, Huctin, Gherardi, Vanderlinden and Sandré2023). We believe that place-based stories that capture lived experiences of the acute environmental crisis have to be heard and contribute to pluralize Anthropocene discourse.
7.4 Discussion: Embodying an Ethic in a More-Than-Human Earth
The Anthropocene and PB are both familiar concepts for environmental scholars. In contrast, we open up discussions towards what they depict and how those depictions act discursively on the world. The ethical tensions we put into dialogue were towards the idea of quantifying to describe or to master, and the active ignorance regarding the non-quantifiable. On one hand, we would rapidly agree (and hence not further develop here) that Anthropocenic concepts are valuable to produce a certain panorama of the environmental crisis. PB, for instance, provide a glimpse on nine quantifiable parameters and their evolution over time (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Steffen and Lucht2023) – six of them have surpassed the safe operating system. Therefore, the latter have the capacity to be visually transposed which might help to foster awareness and provoke transformative actions. On the other hand, we further debate the limitations of such concepts which are not inherently neutral, while largely pretending to be so, and may tend to reproduce multifaceted domination and violence, including on other-than-human beings (Gupta et al. Reference Gupta, Liverman and Prodani2023; Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Gupta and Qin2023).
7.4.1 Unbounding the Anthropocene Discourses
The Anthropocene can be captured as an expression of a dualist framing in the form of a gendered and racialized Man pursuing the liberation from a passive and changeless Nature (Grove & Chandler Reference Grove and Chandler2017: 79). Since its introduction to depict or label a new geological epoch (Crutzen & Stoermer Reference Crutzen and Stoermer2000; Crutzen Reference Crutzen, Ehlers and Krafft2006), the concept of the Anthropocene has been extended beyond geology and gained legitimacy in multiple fields of academia as well as in the public arena. Beyond the debate around the date for the Anthropocene (see for instance critical reflections from Lewis & Maslin Reference Lewis and Maslin2015; Davis & Todd Reference Davis and Todd2017), the diffusion of the concept has been accompanied with tense critiques that both cover a problem-framing – for instance tending to homogenize humanity (see Baldwin & Erickson Reference Baldwin and Erickson2020; Luke Reference Luke2020) – and its embeddedness in the ideology of control and mastering. The Anthropocene was also extensively criticized as hiding root causes of global change found both in imperialism and in racial capitalism (Sealey-Huggins Reference Sealey-Huggins, Johnson, Joseph-Salisbury and Kamunge2018). Alternative terms were suggested to re-root the climate and ecological crisis in the historical development of capitalism (Capitalocene) or enslavement (Plantationocene) (see for instance Haraway Reference Haraway2015; Bonneuil & Fressoz Reference Bonneuil and Fressoz2016). Whatever term one uses, the Anthropocene and more widely the anthropocenic framing are to be understood both as a moment that directly threatens (certain) ways of being in the world and as a global narrative that pursues a dynamic of rendering margins invisible. In other words, the climate and ecological crisis, in its intertwinement with multidimensional upheavals, sheds new lights on the unsustainability of the hegemonic way of experiencing the world, while threatening with higher intensity certain ways-of-being in the world, which are also those less accountable for the situation (see Sultana Reference Sultana2022, Reference Sultana, Solnit and Young Lutunatabua2023; Tuana Reference Tuana2022). Accordingly, we amplify the necessary work of paying more attention to marginalized experiences and narratives from yonder, from the non-Western world, through an ethic of plurality that emphasizes lived experiences. Making such a movement and recognizing how the Anthropocene is framed in reference to a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity (or rather a certain portion of the humanity), we are also tempted to question even further the boundaries of what life matters.
7.4.2 Open Up Space for Other-Than-Human Experiences
The hegemonic way of experiencing the world threatens diverse ways-of-being by exacerbating oppression over some people because of their class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. If we take a critical look at the anthropocentrism of anthropocenic discourses, we might raise the question of how we open space for more-than-human ethics that takes care of non-human beings, as Christine Winter does, in her Chapter 4 on ozone, in this book. Even if Rockström et al. (Reference Rockström, Gupta and Qin2023) recognize that non-humans have been under-considered within the framework of PB, their attempt to provide a theoretical frame for just and safe PB remains limited to a nature/culture divide and a capitalistic model wherein non-human animals’ relations are envisioned through the lenses of appropriation to the profit of humans and where ecosystems are valued for their ability to sustain humanity potentialities. Although the stories we collect are told by humans, it now seems important to us to observe attentively what is at stake for the animals that are part of human practices and activities that we encounter. Additionally, when working with marginalized communities, our ethics regarding caring for the suffering of human beings guide us in questioning and reframing the scope of our moral considerations. This question is notably addressed by non-hegemonic ontologies (for example, animism) (Willerslev Reference Willerslev2007; Escobar Reference Escobar2014; Rivera Andía Reference Rivera Andía2019), multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich Reference Kirksey and Helmreich2010) but also anticolonial critical animal studies (Montford & Taylor Reference Montford and Taylor2020). The aforementioned perspectives involve ethical experiences that guide certain attitudes towards non-human animals but also privilege certain political responses that distance themselves from the ideology of control and mastering. Furthermore, as noted by Bauer (Reference Bauer2016: 416), ‘by reproducing the concept of nature, it also ushers in an implicit politics of knowledge production, creating a political epistemology that often gives Western scientists and technocrats a privileged position to define natural and desirable environmental conditions’.
7.5 Conclusion
Global and anthropocenic narratives – whose acme is met with PB – tend to produce a uniform representation, one embedded in the modern drift that has progressively devolved into an exsanguinated reason – a positivist universalism that is a leitmotif in which reason is deprived of reflexivity and blind to its own practices of domination. If the climate and ecological crisis, in its entanglement with multidimensional upheavals, sheds new light on the unviability of the hegemonic way of experiencing the world, the latter has to be questioned in its internal ability to provide a universal meaning, without deepening its tendency for an abstraction that serves the perpetuation of the control of meaning and restricting the potentialities towards action to a (dominant) minority. We argue that voices displayed on the margins of the Western world contain the seeds to express ontological and epistemological pluralities, to deploy the yonder on the centre and to produce a radical critique of the western drawing up of ongoing upheavals. Critical ethnography offers opportunities to promote reflexive practices, whose intentions are to shed light on and destabilize domination, and to pluralize the understanding of the anthropocenic situations we dwell in too. By doing so, the urgency raised by anthropocenic framings has to deal with the temporality of historical (for example, colonialism, imperialism) and ongoing harms (Gergan Reference Gergan2017) to embrace a care for slow violence (Nixon Reference Nixon2011) and focus attention on unsensational violence that exacerbates the vulnerabilities of ecosystems, non-human and disempowered individuals and groups.
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